This article was originally published in The Courier on 13th January 2018.
KIRI: Wednesday, Channel 4
HARD SUN: Saturday, BBC One
Miriam
is an experienced social worker who one day makes an error of judgement that
leads to tragedy.
She
arranges an unsupervised visit between foster child Kiri and her birth
grandfather. While Miriam is gone, Kiri is apparently abducted by her ex-con father.
A few days later, her body is found. The finger of blame points towards Miriam.
This
is KIRI, a compelling new drama
starring the great Sarah Lancashire. It’s written by Jack Thorne, author of the
Yewtree-inspired National Treasure. Kiri is inspired by another explosive issue torn from the headlines, namely the unjust vilification of social workers.
Miriam
becomes a convenient scapegoat. The media hounds her. The public turns against
her. She’s thrown under the bus by her employers. She drowns herself in booze.
The
murdered girl is black. Her adoptive parents are middle-class
and white. This complicates matters even further. Within days of Kiri’s disappearance, yer actual John Humphrys is on Radio 4 chairing
a debate on the ramifications of children being matched with families from
different cultural backgrounds. Right-wing tabloids accuse social services of
“ticking their lefty boxes”. It all feels depressingly real.
Thorne
is fascinated by the ways in which the media manipulates, exploits and
simplifies complex emotional issues. It constructs binary narratives blithely
untroubled by shades of grey. It gorges on grief and enflames prejudices it helped
to create in the first place.
Though
his writing becomes slightly didactic when his passion and sincerity gets the
better of him, for the most part he devises plausible scenarios, searching arguments and convincing characters. Miriam, with all her quirks and flaws, is
a gift for Lancashire, who’s always at her best when suffering in a pool of
anguish and gallows humour.
Thorne
succeeds in his goal of humanising social workers. They are, after all, human.
They sometimes make mistakes, but they also do a lot of good. You never read
about that in the press, of course. Kiri
shows what happens when social workers, who devote their professional lives to
helping people, end up needing help themselves.
A
nuanced polemic and compassionate character study, Kiri is a valuable piece of work.
“Nuance”
isn’t in Neil Cross’ vocabulary. The Luther
creator deals in heightened pulp fiction powered by graphic violence and a grim
world view. He probably wrote Victorian Penny Dreadfuls in a previous life.
His
obsessions reached some kind of crazed apogee in HARD SUN, a propulsive sci-fi conspiracy thriller which, like Luther, treads a fine line between entertaining
largesse and outright nonsense.
Blokey
Jim Sturgess and the quietly charismatic Agyness Deyn are mismatched London
coppers who discover that the Earth will be destroyed by an unspecified solar
catastrophe in five years (yes, the Bowie song does appear). The governments of
the world want to keep this rotten news under wraps, lest the human race goes
bananas.
What’s
more, Sturgess appears to be a dodgy copper up to his neck in all sorts of
chicanery, while Deyn’s mentally ill son tried to kill her via stabbings and
arson. She’s also secretly investigating Sturgess. What a carve up.
In
typical Cross fashion, Hard Sun revels
in audacious set-pieces and gore. In order to enjoy it you have to set your
brain into the appropriate gear. Suspension of disbelief is key.
It
is, by its very precarious nature, a show that could go either way, but episode
one set things off in agreeably crackerjack style. I’m a sucker for paranoid dramas
wreathed in apocalyptic futility, and Hard
Sun doesn’t disappoint on that front.
